In this time, Zefaris quietly took several photographs; from Ingvald inspecting Carnifex Fulguris, to him feverishly sketching it both as a weapon and as a spirit. She managed to catch a moment where he rubbed out a swath of charcoal in anger at his own failure to capture the true thickness of Fulguris’ thighs.
Gradually, the Fey Mood’s hold over Ingvald loosened. His obsession had been satisfied to the fullest conceivable extent, and with the power of the Forgemother having been exhausted for the short-term, his mind was now clear. It took a short time after this before he fully calmed down, as even without being gripped by divine insanity, he was still enamored with both forms of his Great Work. After seeing Zef’s photographs, he asked to see the manual, if she had it. Giving it a brief read led him to use an oblique alchemical process to create full-colour, metal printed copies for himself.
“It’s not so complicated, what that machine does to fancy paper… Don’t tell those SuFeSh guys that I copied their process, eh? I wager they’d get upset, going by all the legalese on the first page.”
Afterwards he went into the back to retrieve something, but this was only after he had hung several of the metal-prints up around his above - notably one which captured Fulguris in her full glory, flexing with one arm and pointing skyward with the other.
“Ah… Right, here,” Ingvald said, holding out a small, palm-sized rectangle. It was starmetal, of course, engraved with a complex glyph on one side and etched to reveal the starmetal’s damascened pattern. “You can link it to your Tablet. If you find someone with the knowhow and tooling, you might be able to get ‘em to transfer the logic automaton into it wholesale, rid you of that cumbersome stone thing. Not my forte, sad to say. I’ve got a couple more blanks that I made in case I fucked up on the first go round. Take them.”
“Ingvald, you’ve already given me-”
“-enough to make us even. Not an iota more. And even if I happen to give you another thing, it will still be enough to make us even and not an iota more. I watched the whole thing; the Forgemother showed me. Her - your - words still ring inside my head, y’know; a flame that burns so bright to lighten the darkest night sky, all that. Didn’t take you for such an idealist.”
“What did you take me for?” she grinned, raising an eyebrow.
“There’s a world’s gap between a cultivator with principles, a righteous cultivator even, and one who truly sees herself as a righteous destroyer of evil. I suppose there has to be a reason you have the Charred Judge’s face,” the Forgehand grinned right back.
“Now siddown and turn around, I want a look at that seal on your back. It can’t be a typical Fog Storage deal, so I wager…”
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Zel had spun on a heel and dropped to the ground by this point, with the Forgehand instantaneously lurching forward to closely inspect the strange seal which now seemed to contain Carnifex Fulguris. He ran the coarse fingers of his burned hand over it, hemming and hawing until he uttered: “Oh, I see what’s going on. Throw all my theories right out the fuckin’ window, I guess.”
“You know how the glyph works already?”
“Me? Hell no, I couldn’t figure this shit out if I stared at your asscrack for a year! My piece of the Forgemother just up and told me, just now. You’ve forge-welded yourself and that cleaver together; siamese twins don’t have souls this conjoined. This glyph must be like one of those curse-marks that parasitic spirits manifest out of, but… For a weapon spirit. The cleaver’s now a part of you as much as that bronze arm. Helluva way to take Storm-soul Cultivation’s “union with the blade” tenet to the next level. I just wish I could take a look inside to see if you’ve got seven starmetal vertebrae to go with the glyph.”
“Forge-welded together, you say? You’d think that I would’ve noticed changes by now,” she grinned.
“Only if your weapon spirit happened to be of a different disposition to yours, which uh…”
Ingvald glanced at one of the metal prints, depicting Zelsys and Fulguris in the same exact pose, smugly pointing a finger at the camera.
“...I don’t think it could be any less the case. In the most extreme circumstance, a weapon spirit might simply refuse to cooperate or even fight the wielder for control over the body, if the spirit is ancient and the would-be wielder is some dipshit that pulled the shiny sword out of a rock in the woods. Though, I doubt that even one of the Seven Slaughtering Swords could take much of a hold of you. I would very much like to say that I have advice as to how to deal with being fused to an inhuman spirit, what with my own cohabitation with the Forgemother and all, but I don’t. You’re on your own.”
He slapped Zelsys on the back. By the time she stood back up, the Forgehand was already gone again, and returned with a small handful of Huén coins.
“Next thing, the money. I said I only needed three-thousand three-hundred thirty-three in Huén, but I ended up using nearly everything you gave me for the reinforcing enchantments. The power in those coins is… Not so great. I would suggest that you do not become enamored with Jade Dragons, either; they are not unique by any means, and derive their greatest value from their ability to stabilize far vaster flows of magic through their use to form trigrams. A blade the likes of yours couldn’t be forged only using Jade Dragons and mundane steel even if one had a whole storehouse of the things.”
Zel smiled.
“I never fully expected Jade Dragons to suffice to begin with. Why else do you think I chased after every other opportunity that presented itself? You, the Fallenstar Heartmetal, Eisengeist, Eldartha itself. Though, I can’t help but ask - what exactly did you use my Huén for?”
“Momentum Control Assistance and Center of Mass Adjustment. You could say I used them to smooth out the edges of those enchantments, so to speak. Before you go, come back in a couple days. I'll have everything else finished by then. Bring Jorfr. Now leave me be, I need to rest my old bones and ponder what I shall make of the dragonsteel I kept for myself. A classical wolfblade sword, perhaps…”
It was abundantly clear that he was forcing himself to shoo them away, his gaze constantly magnetized by Carnifex Fulguris. Zel acquiesced, and departed his abode for the time being.